


remember me as a time of day

by somethingradiates



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-22
Updated: 2012-05-22
Packaged: 2017-11-05 19:50:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/410352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingradiates/pseuds/somethingradiates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Monroe has been dead for nine hundred and sixty-four hours, nine thousand, eight hundred and forty minutes, almost six days, and Nick can’t bring himself to take his number off of his speed dial. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	remember me as a time of day

**i**

They leave Monroe’s body in his house. There’s no attempt to make it a sign -- they don’t drag him to Nick’s front porch or anything. 

But they know that he’ll come here, that he’ll see his big feet sticking out of the doorway to the kitchen. They know that Nick will see the blood before anything else.

 

**ii**

Six people go to the funeral -- Rosalee, Bud and his wife, and three other Wesen that Monroe has formed tenuous friendships with in his time here. Word has spread that Monroe was killed by agents of the Verrat; other Wesen are too scared to risk public allegiance to pay their respects. 

Nick doesn’t go. Rosalee tells him later that night; he’s curled up on the couch in the back of the shop, staring into space. He’s in what feels like high-functioning shock; he can talk and walk and even smile when he needs to, he can comprehend and drive and make himself coffee, but it feels like there’s some impasse in his mind, some huge gaping chasm that stings and burns and shocks when he ventures too close, something covered in Monroe’s tight, precise handwriting, something that smells like overpriced coffee and cigarettes and Tide laundry detergent (“the kind in the white bottle,” Monroe’s voice says). He feels like he aches all over, feels like he hasn’t slept in days even though Monroe’s ashes were only scattered today.

(“I put your share in the Jeep,” Rosalee says, a little bit hesitantly. “For... you know. Whenever.” He says _thank you_ in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own.)

 

**iii**

Monroe has been dead for nine hundred and sixty-four hours, nine thousand, eight hundred and forty minutes, almost six days, and Nick can’t bring himself to take his number off of his speed dial. 

 

**iv**

_Please no,_ the Hundjäger says, her voice a sharp, eerie mockery of Nick’s own. _Please, please, Monroe, not you, please,_ and she’s quoting him, verbatim, quoting exactly what he’d said on his frantic emergency call after he’d found Monroe. 

Nick knows this is supposed to be a peaceful meeting -- there are Wilderfrieden here, watching impassively from their chairs -- and he doesn’t draw the gun on his hip because he can remember Monroe telling him about Wilderfrieden, the wardens of the Wesen, the peacekeepers that can rip a grown man in half without flexing their deceptively thin biceps. 

He commits her face to memory, though, studies the sharp clean line of her jaw and her delicately upturned nose, the long curtains of her dark hair.

 

**v**

He doesn’t sleep much, still, even this long after -- this long, like it will be better six days or six weeks or six months along, this long, like six years from now won’t hurt. He sleeps in Marie’s trailer, stretched out on the foldaway bed when he has the foresight to sleep properly, head in his arms on the desk when he doesn’t. 

He always dreams about the same thing, Monroe’s blood stark and bright against the floorboards, skin still warm when Nick presses two shaking fingers against where his absent pulse should beat. He always dreams about his own voice, about his trembling hands fighting to get his phone out of his pocket, about _please, God, no_ and _not you, not you, anyone but you_. 

 

**vi**

_I have information that might interest your Grimm_ , Ian says in a letter late in October. There are two phone numbers listed, one for “before 5 November” and one for “after 5 November”; when Nick Googles them, one is based out of Ireland, and the other is based out of London. 

Nick calls him as soon as he’s done reading the letter, ignoring Rosalee when she says that it’s four in the morning in England. Ian picks up on the second ring, asking him if he can make his way to Dublin before Nick even gets a chance to say hello.

 

**vii**

Nick’s retribution, when he finally gets names, is swift. The Hundjäger at the peace meeting is named Shannon O’Hare, and wasn’t the one to kill Monroe. Her siblings, Valerie and Caleb, were. 

The crime scene that Nick leaves behind in Cork would make Hank and Wu step outside for air after a few seconds. There isn’t a lot left of Valerie and Caleb O’Hare in the apartment they share, and he wonders on his flight home if their dental records will even be that much use. 

His flight back home ends in Baltimore. He drives into Syracuse in a rented SUV and puts a bullet through Shannon’s head, execution-style, while she stirs hazelnut creamer into her coffee.

 

**viii**

“I hope that made you feel better,” Rosalee says, a little bit dryly, as Nick stirs oleander into the slowly-boiling mixture in her kettle. 

“It really did,” he says, and pretends not to see the look she gives him. 

 

**ix**

_I'm sorry_ , Nick says, and runs his fingertips over the top of the headstone. He hasn't been out here, not since everything. There are flowers every day, Rosalee tells him. Someone brings bluebells every Saturday. There are daisies, today, daisies and violets and something else that he can't name, not in a bouquet but scattered around the headstone like a thin carpet. 

Monroe was born on the fifteenth of May. He was thirty-five when he died. Nick hadn't known his birthday, or what his parents' names were, or what his favorite class was in school.

But, he thinks. He knows his favorite coffee brand, and his favorite holiday, and his favorite shirt -- the red-and-black plaid one with the hole in the collar, the one folded up underneath his pillow on the foldaway. He knows that Monroe didn't take sugar in his coffee but always took milk, knows that he bit his bottom lip when he was flustered, knows enough about Monroe to write his own entry in the book about him, about just him, about someone that walked and breathed and spoke and loved. 

_I'm sorry_ , he breathes again, and wonders if Monroe would've known what for.


End file.
